Wedding: Faraway Fairytale

Once upon a time there was a guy named Johnny Won who wanted to fall in love, fairytale style.

"I always wanted to get married, even at a young age. You grow up watching all these shows on TV, where they fall in love the second they see the right person. I bought the fairytale, I totally bought it," says the 30-year-old, who went to high school in Irvine.

Thing is, "it" never happened. He had one girlfriend in high school, but then no relationships the entire time he studied mechanical engineering at UCLA, and then not even as he began to pursue his career as a systems engineer at a firm in El Segundo. We're talking nada. Nothing. Zip.

"I didn't want to waste anyone's time. So, if I didn't feel it, I moved on."

"Uh, yeah. Pretty much my whole family. And all my friends," he says now with a laugh.

Meanwhile up in Northern California, a young Taiwanese woman named Ashley Liu was studying fashion merchandising at San Francisco Academy of the Arts. She had dated a few guys but nothing serious, and anyway, her student visa had almost expired and she planned to return to her country. But right before she was to leave, a woman she knew at church stopped her after the service to chat.

"She said, 'It's a pity you didn't meet anyone here. I wish I knew someone nice to introduce you to,'" Liu, 29, recalls. "Just then her son, Timothy Chang, who had also gone to UCLA, said, 'Wait! I do know someone!' I thought he was joking."

So imagine her surprise when, two weeks later, after she was well ensconced back in her life in Taipei, Taiwan, she gets an email from the woman at church asking if it's all right to forward her email to this nice young man named Johnny, who was also in the church. "I thought, just to know someone, to be friendly, why not? So I said OK."

Cut to Won, whose friend Timothy Chang was pitching him the idea of contacting this girl in Taiwan he'd never even seen, let alone met. The idea turned out not to be as far-fetched as it sounds: Coincidentally, he already had tickets to go to Taipei, of all places.

"I had already planned to go with a buddy of mine," says Won, an ethnically Korean all-American, who doesn't speak a word of Mandarin or much of anything but English. "We had wanted to go there and just party -- but things quickly changed. It's even weird how things kind of came together. This all was planned before I had even heard of Ashley."

So serious is Won about romance that he took two weeks contemplating whether even to send her an email. "I was praying about whether I should consider it. I needed some sense of peace about contacting her. I knew she was a quality person, he says.

And then, there's Facebook.

"The stalker within me came out -- I started looking at her pictures!" he admits. "I was reminded that I had passed by her picture before on Facebook because of our mutual friends at church. I remembered thinking, 'She's really pretty but she's probably married.' She looked like someone who would be taken."

But on Dec. 21, 2011 he took a deep breath and hit "send" on a Facebook message—never imagining that one year and a day later, they would walk down the aisle in a garden ceremony at Five Crowns in Corona Del Mar in front of nearly 100 friends and family.

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